Conventionally, commercial products whose surface is coated with shellac have been known.
The heat resistance, strength, and gloss of the coating greatly benefit prevention of the product from melting when held in hand, prevention of the surface from being scrapped because of products chafing against each other, improvement of product quality such as outer appearance thereof, or the like.
In general, employed is a method in which a revolving pan is utilized, which method comprises pouring a shellac solution while chocolate with a substantially spherical shape and less irregularities or the like is rotated in a revolving pan and drying the resultant to form a thin layer on the surface of chocolate.
Further, as a method of coating with shellac, a method of immersing chocolate or the like in a tank filled with a shellac solution has been disclosed (Patent Document 1). However, conventional shellac has a strong bitter taste and thus is easy to adversely affect the taste of chocolate. Because of this, an amount of coating tended to be lowered as much as possible in such a way that the influence on the taste of the product decreased.
Further, what may be conventionally employed is a method of coating in advance the surface of an oil-based confection with glucose syrup, sugar solution, or the like before the surface of the oil-based confection is coated with shellac. This is an effective means to impart gloss to the surface of the oil-based confection. Yet, when the coating with the sugar solution was not for some reason carried out in advance, a more amount of shellac was required for the coating in order to impart comparable gloss; and thus the bitter taste of shellac excessively stood out when conventional shellac was used, resulting in failure to produce one suitable as a product.
Meanwhile, the shape of chocolate products nowadays comes to diverse in associated with diversification of individual's preferred taste. The available are, for example, a confection with oil-based coating whose surface has a large number of projections and a chocolate confection whose surface exhibits marked irregularities such as chocolate with relief, which are described in Patent Document 2.